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Hugo Awards Turn (Even More) Political
An anonymous reader writes Last year, the Hugo Awards went to mostly minorities and women. In response, a fan group decided to fight back against what they saw as a liberal attack on their medium. It appears that they have succeeded, as the 2015 nominees are predominantly chosen by a group called "Sad Puppies. Now a counter-counter group is trying to ensure that no one wins any Hugo awards in any category except Best Novel.
I'm trying to recall the last time I read a book because it won an award... but I'm coming up blank.
#DeleteChrome
They wrote something that people liked to read or watch?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
From what I've read, the Hugos, the SFWA, etc. have all been slowly taken over by SJWs in the past 10-15 years. Certainly, I once used the Hugos as a way of finding interesting new authors - but this hasn't been possible for several years, unless you are looking for a social-justice tract. Certainly "hard" SF has been scarce for a long time.
The "sad puppies" group is drumming up support for good writing that wouldn't otherwise get nominated, because it doesn't meet the SJW criteria. If the "sad puppies" have a political center, then it will obviously be a bit on the right, just because they by definition disagree with the SJW crowd. However, politics isn't supposed to be the point - if anything, it is (hopefully!) about removing, or at least counteracting the political filtering from the works nominated for the Hugo awards.
Some of the authors supporting the sad-puppy movement include:
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The backlash comes from a number of avenues, but a strong reason for this anger is that by the introduction of "slates", the Sad Puppy movement may have irretrievably damaged the Hugos. It is akin to introducing party politics into elections that were previously sets of independents. Once introduced, you can never go back, because that just lets another slate win.
What are the odds that everyone abandons parties and goes back to independents, when parties so evidently work?
Likewise, voting on what you feel is the best book becomes an exercise in futility as it will be swamped by one slate or another. (A best book slate, is of course, ridiculous, that's what the award was supposed to be in the first place.) Instead, as with parties, you end up with voting on what a slate represents.
And that is anathema to the whole point of the award.
Now, I'm fairly certain that the Sad Puppies slate has people who never agreed to be on it, or didn't quite understand what this was all about, so I'm not about punishing those on the slate. But the "Sad Puppies" movement has poisoned this years Hugos, and may well have killed them forever.
Note: any award with a small number of voters is vulnerable to this kind of take-over. The award really can only meaningfully exist only as a consensus in the community not to game them into oblivion exists.
Citation, please? I've noticed that Scalzi leaves a thread open on his website where people can push their own recommendations or slates, but I don't think that I have ever seen him endorse any particular slate of candidates. Again, my recollection may be flawed and my quick look at the Google may not have turned up whatever you have in mind, so I am more than willing to be shown that I am wrong---but for that to happen, I would need you to point out where Scalzi has posted such a slate (as I seem to be unable to find it myself).
Rhapsody in Numbers
The Sad Puppies campaign has nothing to do with "minorities and women" winning awards, it had everything to do with Social Justice Warriors taking down and doxxing people for disagreeing with them and trying to impose censorship and speech controls on organizations like SFWA.
In fact this entire, "if you oppose the Social Justice Warrior agenda you hate women and minorities" slight of hand bullshit is one of the very things the sad puppies are fighting against. Thanks for proving the necessity of that fight yet again.
Wow, this post contains epic amounts of FUD and just pure lying.
First of all, the Sad Puppies group started over two years ago.
Second of all, the response was due to stories being subjected to an ideological purity test before being allowed to win.
Third of all, the stories were no longer about telling a story, but were all about 'sending the right (approved) political message' which was killing the medium.
Fourth of all, several of the awards went to things that not only had nothing to do with Science Fiction or Fantasy, but they sucked ('If you were a dinosaur my love'?? Really?)
Go read all the official Sad Puppies posts, make your own decision. Also I'm pretty sure there are more women nominated this year, than there were last year, and that's from the SP Slate. Don't forget as well, that the SP project was started by a minority.
Last note: The Hugo's have been gamed for a very long time now, look at how many were won by only one publisher. The author of 'Red Shirts' heavily gamed the system the year he won, but no one said a word about that. The promotion of 'message fiction' has seriously hurt the genre, and sales have been going down for years, because most of what's been winning the Hugo's the last five or so years has been crap. Heck, Terry Pratchet couldn't even win a Hugo!!
The awards should be about GOOD stories, not about Politically Correct stories written by the 'RIGHT' person! The very fact that the person writing this story had to LIE about the reason for Sad Puppies, and is more focused on the sex and race of writers should make that pretty clear right off the top.
So that doesn't appear to be what has happened here then. The nominations last year were fairly diverse and of generally good quality, so it's not like there was some effort to unjustly get women's and minority author's works included. It just happened that that year, those were the works released.
In contrast to this year, where there has been an open and transparent attempt to stuff the nominations with white males. Apparently letting the best person win isn't acceptable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC